Cool Neighbors

Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Mountain Movers - The Day Calls Out for You

I have never written a record review before. I do spend a lot of my time either excitedly (shouting) exaggerating the merits of music I enjoy, or enviously and spitefully shooting down music I think to be mediocre. The Mountain Movers' The Day Calls Out for You also seems to be the kind of record I should probably not choose as the first review I ever write, as I have personally recorded two full length albums (one being a double LP), and performed close to 75 shows with the previous incarnation of The Mountain Movers. I was also explicitly informed by the wonderful/courageous administrators of this web address that I shouldn't plug any projects I worked/played on, and although I was in no way involved with this album, I did conveniently fail to mention my prior time spent playing music/drinking beer/smoking pot with Dan Greene and his Mountain Movers.

That being said, I have spent a lot of time with The Day Calls Out for You, and think that it is the strongest Mountain Movers release yet. Anyone familiar with Dan Greene's songwriting, either from The Mountain Movers Safety Meeting Records releases, or from his songs with the legendary Butterflies of Love, will once again find his always confident melodies, hazy vocals, and his mostly sunny though sometimes heavy religious/spiritual journeyman subject matter. The difference is the new version of The Mountain Movers - a stripped-down, fuzzed-out, 2 guitar, recorded on tape amalgam of some seriously psychedelic waves/sunbeams. The title track, along with a few others, have a kind of Neil Young feeling, while a lot of the record reminds me of maybe a more organized/modern day/less drug-addled Godz.

Most of this could probably be traced to the guitar/noise making of Joey Maddalena, one of the two newest members of the group. Maddalena's playing has filled the space left by the previous chamber-pop/horn heavy textures of the old Mountain Movers. I'm currently in a trance as I'm writing, listening to the guitars on "Love is the Way," and feel like I just smoked a ton of questionable marijuana out of a wooden piece in a parking lot even though I'm not actually going to do that until later. The new sound makes more sense to me coming from Dan Greene and company, and now that they've released The Day Calls Out for You on their own Car Crash Avoiders label (see CT Indie archive, Oct. 29 09), I can't wait until they make some more awesome records like this that nobody is going to hear until some pot-head post-post-psych/freak-folk record nerd finds one of the hand-numbered pieces of vinyl in some record dump in 2030, thinks that he found the greatest record ever, tells all his friends, and it gets re-released by Sub Pop or some shit.